Musings on education, techology, and life..
After an immensely frustrating conversation a few days ago in which various stereotypes were thrown about w/r/t techies, women, leadership and more, this frame from Clint LaLonde’s fabulous intro video for a Brian Lamb keynote (hey, where’s the archive of the presentation?) caught my attention.
[screenshot by harry (do you see me?)]
One of the more interesting NMC Symposium on Mashups sessions I attended was Brian Lamb’s wholly unexpected multimedia mashup extravaganza Confessions of a Mashup Un-Artist. Held in Second Life (as you can see in the screenshot above), DJ Goldkey– as Brian is now known– put on a show you really have to listen to or watch. Any textual summary I could make would be useless. Also, Brian has provided some notes about his inspirations and sources in his blog.
What I loved about the whole thing (beyond the fact that it wasn’t another session spent watching slides pass by and beyond the content of the production itself) was the variety of reactions it received. While some just grooved to the sounds, putting their best avatar dance moves to use while peering at the video, others repeatedly asked if they were seeing and hearing what they were supposed to be, while a few were simply befuddled, mystified– even angered– by the whole thing.
I experienced a feeling very similar during this session to one I had during the opening night readings at Northern Voice– an exciting connection with the point, and product, and the why behind our use of these tools. I’m glad Jeffrey Keefer posted his thoughts about the session… not because he is wrong, but because he is in one sense completely right. Those who came to the session with certain expectations borne of a particular set of objectives motivating their attendance at the symposium– such as those expecting practical nuts and bolts of creating a mashup or those wanting to be told how mashups are useful in education or in their classroom– stood a good chance of being disappointed. And while I might not advocate for a whole conference of nothing but such performances (well, I might, but it wouldn’t really be a conference any more, which could be a good thing, and it would answer a generally different set of questions), having activities like this is a Really Good Thing. They remind us of what education is all about– not just the objectives, process and knowledge but also the product and expression.
Facts and instructions are not always– maybe not even usually– the answer. I compare this to the fact that when I’m struggling most with a vexing problem of technology, education and design, I most often turn to a book of poetry or put on some good music. I’d have a hard time coming up with a cogent theory of “application” of Coleridge to how to facilitate a class discussion, but I am keenly aware that for me there is a whole world of richness of expression and thought that ties into the way I live in and approach the world… and most of that world is in the dark, unseen and hard to quantify.
I enjoyed that Brian’s “presentation” was not to elaborate on the composition and details of a mashup and how they might be used, but to give the people attending his session a potentially powerful experience of a mashup for themselves… one whose “content”
centered on the foundational issues of culture, technology and education itself. It strikes me as a bit surprising that so many people there to learn about mashups were uncomfortable and surprised at being confronted by one, reminding me of the classic tensions between theorists and practitioners, and educators and students. Clearly we have a long way to go!
I can’t remain as blasé as some about Blackboard’s recent win in court and the obscene patent they have been granted (as usual, Stephen Downes has a good roundup of reactions to the decision). Here’s why:
Whether it should or will matter later, the LMS matters now. Anyone who knows me knows that I’m all about getting out from under the thumb of the LMS. That being said, my own institution is– like many others– pretty tightly wedded to Blackboard and is likely to remain so for quite some time. It doesn’t matter if I agree with it, the situation is simply part of the context. I’m also relatively pessimistic about how long it will take before a significant amount of instruction at institutions– particularly those that use Blackboard now– moves outside of the LMS. If it does… and there are no guarantees that it will.
The LMS can improve! Given the reality of institutional bonds and decision-making around technology, I can’t just quietly overlook removing one of the only significant forces stimulating the already slow improvement of Blackboard. And it can improve… perhaps not to the point that it could challenge the much better idea of the PLE, but that leaves a lot of room for positive change.
A better LMS actually helps my (our) cause. Ironically, by getting better it would be a lot easier to guide faculty toward new, superior tools. For example, I can just imagine how much more readily an educator who had experience with a good discussion tool in Blackboard would consider and accept a move to more open, social systems. In fact, I don’t have to imagine… I’ve seen it happen with analogous situations. The only way most institutions will change away from Blackboard (or resist it) is if they have a base of vocal, successful educators exerting appropriate pressure.
You can’t expect rational business decisions to follow irrational ones. I don’t buy the argument that the bad taste coming from this decision will spur institutions to move beyond the LMS. The reasons for adopting and keeping a system like Blackboard have very little to do with good teaching or pedagogical affordances (particularly this late in the game), and much to do with economic pragmatics, utilitarian information technology-centric feature sets, and systemic inertia. Expecting a rational decision to switch away from a product when the things that spurred its adoption and powered its retention remain largely– if not wholly– unchanged is wishful thinking at best.
I’d like this decision to be something other people have to worry about, but it isn’t. I’d like the decision not to matter– in line with my inclinations and general philosophy– but it does. At least for me and my institution… and I suspect many others in a similar position.
One part of the podcast of Alan November’s “Using Technology for Building Learning Communities” presentation caught my attention because November highlighted an aspect of wiki educational practice that I hadn’t really consciously thought about before: the use of the history mechanism to extend the educational moment.
In describing a third-grade (!) Wikipedia project, November explained how for months after the students had gone on a field trip and documented a historical landmark, the teacher was still using the history to engage students in the project, asking them each time if the change was one that belonged in the article or not and editing as needed.
Of course this kind of evaluation is something that we expect will happen in wiki projects, but for some reason I’d never really thought about the potential utility of the length of engagement. Most writing projects, even as the result of collaboration and peer editing, are pretty much done when the document has been produced. In my own use of wikis I’ve focused student efforts after the main production on preservation (or creation of new articles) rather than growth and continued use of what they have already made. It’s obvious, I guess, that with living documents, the teachable moments extend beyond the usual frame… and sometimes beyond the bounds of the particular class or course itself. But I hadn’t really thought about it before.
[Please note that the text links in this piece lead to the live visualizations which are both larger and interactive]
I’ve been playing around with Many Eyes (if you are not familiar with it, it is an easy-to-use data visualization suite; you might call it the flickr of data sets and visualizations) steadily since early January when I attended an interesting HICSS session on how much “unintended” use the system was seeing. I’d originally tried it out almost exactly a year ago, but the service has grown by leaps and bounds. It certainly has great potential for educators and teaching, and is already seeing some use there.
I don’t work with a lot of numeric data and most of that is not something I can make public (a good decision on the part of Many Eyes is that all data sets– as well as the visualizations– are completely public and open for others to build visualizations on), though I have tested various sets to try out the wide array of visualization types. So I have focused primarily on the free text visualizations: tag clouds and word trees.
As an example, here are the one- and two- word tag clouds I made of all my blog posts from my Cosmopoetica Blog:
And some stills of working down a word tree based on the same data:
It’s interesting to compare those to the same visualizations for this blog…
The process of creating a data set is simple: you simply upload the data through a web form through copy and paste from a text file or a spreadsheet. The text area is pretty smart about interpreting the data and doing the right thing and the text filters take out common stop words (articles and many prepositions). The only thing I did to all of these text files was a simple search and replace to delete all numbers and a couple of meaningless stop words like the title of the blog.
Following up on a good idea by George Siemens relayed through a Tweet by Alan Levine I also did some visualizations of the last five years of Horizon reports. I did each individually (2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008) and then one for the combined texts of all years. Here is a still of the combined cloud for all reports, single and double:
It’s really quite illuminating to compare the years. Note how objects disappear in favor of social and social networks and then data and information come in late (no doubt the Web 2.0 meme). And is there any better sign that the NMC report is on the right track than the two-word tag cloud? Augmented reality, creative expression, collective intelligence, social networking, virtual worlds– it’s the bingo card we all want to fill out.
[Incidentally, it took far longer to click around to each set and create the visualizations than it did to create the data sets... all I had to do for those was save the PDF files as text and again, replace numbers and three common words: horizon, report and reports, and upload.]
Another interesting feature of the Many Eyes system is that any particular view of a visualization that has been manipulated can be integrated as a snapshot with comments. For instance, there is a visualization of book publishing trends, below which are comments, many linked to specific views of the data. Good stuff.
The NMC/ELI 2008 Horizon Report is available on the Horizon Project Wiki.
But wait, there’s much more on the Horizon wiki:
The Horizon report isn’t always surprising, but it is almost always useful– and the activities and resources being built around it are quite exciting. If this kind of stuff was happening last time I missed it completely…
Will Richardson and Stephen Downes have noted Danah Boyd’s interesting post about social networks and social tools in educational settings. The distinction is an important, but not a new one, stemming from the traditional nomenclature of YASNS (yet another social network) and socially enabled applications. The two come somewhat closer together with applications like Facebook (particularly given FB’s extensibility), but I the gap is fairly wide.
A couple of notes, though:
Higher education is different. College students are more likely to benefit from the traditionally social applications, not just because of their relative maturity (save the smart remarks), but because the classroom communities in higher ed are generally weaker, if they exist at all. Sometimes this is a matter of logistics– class size and frequency of meeting– but it’s also simply a function of a different kind of population.
Student services are different… for higher education at least. While we all want to avoid creating a creepy treehouse, I think the real future for social networks in education lies in the realm of student services (and extended activities, obviously, such as clubs, sports, alumni groups, etc). I’m not convinced, even in higher ed, of efforts to mold a social network application like Facebook or MySpace into an instructional space, but using those networks to provide information that students need about services and activities– in a way that isn’t intrusive or creepy– is a logical and growing service.
Familiarity doesn’t have to breed contempt. While I believe educators can build a stronger network more quickly with social applications like Twitter, blogging and social bookmarking, social network applications provide an easy point from which to begin exploring what is, for many, a completely new world of communication and participation. Many groups (in my case publishers, presses, poetry and writing groups) find applications like Facebook an easy and amenable place to quickly create a communication presence, again providing an easy entrance for educators and a quick means to establish some basic, useful connections.
Social network <> Social networking. Keep the distinctions clear, if only for clarity in operation. In this context, social networks or social network applications refer to a relatively specific kind of application: those which facilitate social interactions and in which those social interactions are the primary coin of the realm. Facebook and MySpace are the most prominent, to which you can add Orkut, Friendster, etc. This is different from social applications or social tools, in which the social interactions facilitated are directed toward a social object– a bookmark, a blog post, a wiki page, a document, a photo, etc. Social tools are tools like flickr, del.icio.us, blogs, wikis, and a kajillion-trillion others. Social networking occurs with both kinds of application and all can comprise part of a personal learning network, but social tools are not the same as social network applications in this discussion.
Maybe I’m just unflappable due to being on vacation, or perhaps I’m even more skeptical of institutional support than others, but I think people are wringing their hands way too much over the demise of EduSpaces. Or perhaps I’m just surprised that they haven’t been wringing their hands until now. If you haven’t been following the situation, Brian has an insightful post with lots of links and Gardner has taken notice too…
A couple of thoughts, though:
Last week we had George Siemens, czar of Connectivism, on-site at the Center for Distance Education as our most recent visiting scholar.
Except for a disagreement about Marc Prensky (I think he’s a polemicist/provocateur/gadfly who deserves a tip of the hat in passing; I suspect George would happily put him in a head crusher) I found that most of what George presented to and discussed with us resonated with my evolving view of education, teaching and learning. That’s no surprise given that I’ve been talking about Connectivism and Connected Knowledge since their early days (this dialogue between George and Stephen Downes is another part of the puzzle, as are some of the conversations that took place during the online Connectivism Conference, such as this Challenge to Connectivism thread). If nothing else I knew it had to be a good thing for faculty and staff to hear some of these ideas from someone other than me!
Despite all that, and it being my suggestion that we try to bring George up, I was a bit skeptical. I’m naturally suspicious of all good ideas that are not my own, particularly when they come under the umbrella of a clever coinage, and George is a seemingly tireless presenter. Frankly, I was concerned that he might be more salesman and sophist than educator and theorist.
My concerns were for naught. I’m sympathetic to Bill Kerr’s continued questioning of Connectivism, particularly these three basic queries (as I would rank them in ascending order of importance):
But I’m not sure that resolving those questions matters as much to me as the productivity of Connectivism as a lens for examining and transforming educational practice. George made regular, accurate references to those that had come before (his ability to do so on the fly while making relevant points without just throwing citations around and name-dropping as some do was impressive) and I see what he is promoting as building upon– not throwing away– earlier theories. All I can do is continue my own investigations and if something dissonant comes up I’ll ask him about it.
Connectivism in practice is the key question. As I said, the theory/model resonates with me and fits with my experience not just as teacher, but also as a learner. The latter might even be more important. I see Connectivism as an essential part of a fabric that includes social networks, learning communities, information fluency, and Third Places. But what does it mean to a faculty member on the ground teaching class X to a diverse group of students? How specifically can they engage (or take into account) Connectivist theory? What will students be doing and how will they be assessed?
We’re working towards answers to these questions with individual course development efforts and it might be that generalized answers aren’t possible beyond those many of us are already promoting: educational conversation, collaboration, network resource building, etc. Educational blogging (the practice encapsulating micro-publishing, syndication, and subscription)– for learner and educator alike– is certainly a fundamental practice, a platform upon which we can share the answers we discover…
My first activity at WCET was putting on a pre-conference session on Web 2.0 tools and technologies with Ritchie Boyd, Darren Crone and Jenny Jopling.
As usual I had far more material gathered together than I could share, which was intentional– I figure if someone is actually interested by something they hear then they can follow up later. If that’s too much for someone then they probably aren’t ready to teach with these tools anyway.
Before I arrived in Atlanta I’d decided that from here on out, if I can get away with it, I’m just going to be presenting my sometimes cantankerous personal position rather than trying to present an ‘objective’ approach because:
The materials from the session are online, but I can distill them even further. I was surprised at the positive reaction to some guidelines I provided about wikis and was actually able to convey a little of the usefulness of Twitter (thanks in part to the fortuitous presence of Alphabunny).
If only one point sticks, I hope it was/is the last one.